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World of Warcraft

Attention! Attention! A message is arriving from an Alternate Universe.

<Crackle… crackle…>
This is an announcement from Blizzard on the Azerite Radio Network.

As we know, Azerite was discovered in Silithus some time ago. But there has been <crackle…. crackle> a new discovery by the Gnomes and Goblins about how to use this magical substance. Azerite can now be used to travel throughout the Worlds of Warcraft.

While World of Warcraft v8.1.5 adds a lot of new content, it also is removing things from the game. In this case, many of the portals that get players around Azeroth in a timely fashion are being taken out to keep “the world having a meaningful size”. However, this design decision has sparked a massive backlash with the community, with several threads topping the 5,000 response mark. A new dev post acknowledges the outcry but essentially says, “Sorry, not sorry. We’re sticking to it.”

[…]

Wow Travel Has Always Been Slower than in Other Games

All the other games I play have always had portals. Wow has been alone is not providing universally fast ways to get around the world. If you aren’t a mage, or don’t have a mage in your party, then it’s always been a trek to get to a ship, airship or portal to where you want to go. Of course you can fly long distances, but those flights take “Real Time”, whether you use your own mount or take a flight they move at the same speed. Ship / Airship travel is a pair of short cut scenes and a portal across the world. At least they got that right. But unlike other games, there is no setting for SKIP THE TRAVEL CUTSCENE I have seen hundreds of times. And I still have to stand around waiting on a Wow [Air]Ship rather than it being ready to go when I am. No waiting in FFXIV on any ship and the cut scenes are optional.

It has long been a convention in most MMOs that to teleport to somewhere you must have been there before. Guild Wars 2 is a good example of this convention. Asura Gates, which are like Wow Portals take you anywhere, and will work the first time you use them. But the Waypoints must have been visited on foot before you can teleport to them. But in GW2 once you visit a place, you can instantly travel across the world to any waypoint, for a small fee.

I received a DMCA Copyright Violation Notice from my ISP and when I called my ISP, they reported a date and time and the program “World of Warcraft -name of private server”. I have removed the name of the private server that I was trying to use.

It turns out that the Client that I was trying to use was an old copy of the Legion 7.3.5 client that had not yet been modified to not reach out to Blizzard resources. So this client was trying to update it self to the latest client. But Blizzard had changed the resources to update the latest client, but is watching these old resources for accesses and then reporting those accesses back to ISPs with DMCA Copyright Violation notices. This of course has a chilling effect in my use of World of Warcraft private server since I could lose my internet access.

Ok. So apparently Blizzard cannot take down the private servers themselves – maybe because they are off-shore, or for some other reason Legally Out of Bounds to Blizzard.

So now Blizzard has gone after the users of WoW Private Servers.

Well since I am not playing WoW as provided by Blizzard, not because I refuse to pay, but because I don’t like the new features. I restarted my subscription back in the early days of Legion – middle 2017 – but left when the PTR [Private Test Realm] showed the direction that Blizzard was going with Level Scaling. I refuse to play because of Level Scaling, as I’ve pointed out several times before. Private servers have choices of other releases, such as Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria or Wrath of the Lich King.

Vanilla or Classic is not interesting for me. It’s too primitive. I wish Blizzard and the users well with Vanilla, but Warlords or Mists are the patches that I would choose, or I’ll play something else.

I’ve found a private server that provides the Warlords of Draenor patch of Wow. That’s where I am now. These Private Server folks provide choices of patch levels – Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords and Legion. I chose WoD for two reasons.

I love the zone design of the areas of WoD. Garrisons are neat, but I never got into the whole “Missions” thing. But having a pet buddy along on your questing can be cool. We’ll see if those functions are implemented when I get there.

The Legion patch level is 7.3.5, which wiki’s indicate implements world wide level scaling, which I am definitely not a fan of. I may give it a try later, but for now I’m good with WoD.

In December 2017, Blizzard released details of their Game Wide Level Scaling and I was able to play it in the Public Test Realm [PTR]. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t articulate just why, but it seemed to be a betrayal of the nature of the game for me.

Now I understand better why I felt that way after watching a talk from the recent Game Developer Conference on Youtube. Here is that talk:

In this classic 2012 GDC talk, Naughty Dog’s Kaitlyn Burnell explore games that break autonomy, competence and relatedness in powerful ways to inspire developers to think outside the box.

This talk covers the importance of game players feeling Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness as they play the game and how the game design in these areas greatly effects the engagement that the players have with the game.

I can’t believe it. After what, a year of planning, and a PTR – Public Test Realm – and all the hype about a better leveling experience and the second “Big Squish” and more challenge, they messed it up.

Over the years, Blizzard has made the game easier to level at least at lower levels with Heirlooms, and easier dungeons and Wow Tokens and lots of other things. I came back to WOW in May 2017 and played through December 2017 when all the hype was going strong about the new expansion and how they were going to change the leveling experience. As some of the changes began going up on the PTR, I got over there and tried them out. Turns out I still had a PTR account, which I had signed up for years ago – they keep you signed up if you ever do. Well I found the PTR experience a real drag for reasons that I’ve talked about before. As a quick example, as a level 110, in a level 80-90 area – Pandaria – the mobs were leveled up to my level. So what does level 80-90 mean if the mobs are going to jack up to 110 to follow you? Who knows what changes and tweaks they have been making in the last seven months, but it doesn’t sound good based on these launch results.

Well, maybe now that the population in general is seeing the new leveling / progression design, they are not as psyched as all those folks that Blizzard was listening to a year and a half ago when they started talking about it.

It will be interesting to “Watch from Afar” as this plays out. I have a “Trial” account that I can use to see what things look like from 1-20, but that’s not all that interesting when the cap is 110.

Anyway, I’m having a great time since December 2017 with Final Fantasy XIV.

[I don’t have pictures from the Antorus fight, but here are some pictures from Dungeons I’ve played in Wow. ] I saw this article in PC Gamer today.

It sounds like he must have been wearing a diaper, but never the less, that’s a lot of work.

In World of Warcraft, players are often willing to go to extremes just to say they’ve done it. Some might spend all their time grinding out hard to get achievements while others will run a raid boss hundreds of times in hopes of getting some rare loot. But Rextroy is of a higher caliber. He beat the first raid boss of Antorus, The Burning Throne all by himself—and it only took him a measly eight hours. His reward? I’m not sure exactly. Bragging rights? I guess?
[…]

You can watch the whole video here. It’s been compressed to about 13 minutes. You may want to watch the first few minutes and then skip to near the end to see him hiding in the pool to avoid the huge AOE attack that is supposed to challenge a Raid group of 10-15 players.

I’m sick of playing it and sick of hearing about it. Here’s an example of a 97 Mage in the area near Kahdgar’s hangout in Talador. I’ve played through this area with every class, and taken out No’losh, the Elite swamp walker, every time on Live. But in PTR, he’s a 99 – level scaled up above my 97 mage and he can’t be solo’d even with the Mage helper Serena. And another thing. Notice the fight with the Shambler and Bloodpetals.

They almost got me again since they gang up on you outside the cave. But notice the Bloodpetals give the same XP as the Shamblers? Huh? Those little guys were weaker in Live. Supposed to be since there is a gang of them. But not in PTR and likely not in 7.3.5 either. The level scaling has so many issues you would not believe.

I just found a neat feature. /played which is a chat command that displays the time played for the current character since creation and in the current level.

Update: See below.

Since I reupped in May, I’ve been leveling some toons pretty efficiently. I typically used dungeons to level 60, then quests through Outland, Northrend, Vashj’ir and Pandaria. Some dungeons were played after level 60, but primarily quests were used to level. At this point, they continued with Quests and Treasure Hunting through Draenor. Treasure hunting gives about 1.5 times the XP of a quest in the area, so using a Treasure Hunting AddOn can be a very efficient way to level, especially if you can fly through Draenor.

The goal is to get to 101 before going to Legion. All the characters have 4 Heirloom armor pieces, an Heirloom weapon and a necklace. At level 101, there is a jump in Heirloom item level, which will help a lot when starting Legion. Here are the play times for some of these characters leveled this way to about 100:

Leveling to 100ish

Before taking these characters to Draenor, I took a Demon Hunter through the DH starting area, and then directly to Draenor to most efficiently get Draenor Pathfinder. So all other characters could fly in Draenor. As these characters reached Level Cap of Outland, and Northrend they moved on to the next area. Before moving to Draenor, some of the classes were taken to 91 to boost the Heirloom Item Level, but in general this is not that necessary. The Pandaria and Draenor starting areas are quite friendly and reasonable even with green level gear.

I’ve been playing the PTR [ Public Test Realm] to see what Level Scaling looks like. So far I’m not a fan. Update below.

It’s a real drag.
Classes do better that have self heal – Priest, Paladin, Shaman, Druid, Warlock, Demon Hunter obviously. Mages are going to be at a disadvantage with no good tank pet and no self heal. Shaman and Balance Druid are under powered and will do a lot of self healing. With their pet, Hunters are fine in 10-20 areas that I’ve tried.

Priest and Paladin and Warlock do all right, but it’s a real drag. Lots of healing of course. Each major quest gets you 7.5% of a level. And higher repair bills too. Why isn’t repair gone or zero cost? The problem with it taking longer to kill mobs is that they have time to gang up on you.